In
the early morning hours of May 31, Israeli commandos seized a flotilla
of ships
in the Mediterranean carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza, the
Palestinian
territory devastated by the Israeli military a year and a half ago. The
Israel
“Defense” Force sent an armada of navy gun ships to stop the Gaza
Freedom
Flotilla which had set sail from Cyprus with over 700 unarmed
anti-occupation
activists and some 10,000 tons of supplies including medical supplies,
used clothing,
toys, milk powder, as well as building materials – all excluded by the
Israeli
blockade which has sealed off the Gaza Strip for over three years. At
least nine
of the passengers were killed by the commandos, while 57 were wounded.
Israeli
authorities grotesquely claimed its killers engaged in “self-defense”
against “lynching”
by passengers armed with “life-threatening means,” including “deck
furniture.” But
IDF commandos confirm that the Israeli forces opened fire even before
they hit
the deck, and photos show that wounded Israeli soldiers were cared for
by ship
doctors. All but one of the dead were shot at close range, their bodies
riddled
with bullets. These were executions, and the Israeli ship seizure was
state
terrorism.

All
this took place in international waters, at least 60 miles from Gaza.
The
Zionist state of Israel carried out a clear act of piracy on the high
seas. The
slaughter touched off an outpouring of anger around the globe. Since
the aid
flotilla was organized in Turkey and the dead were Turkish, tens of
thousands converged
on Taksim Square in Istanbul to protest the Israeli outrage. There were
huge
protests as well in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, in Pakistan, Malaysia
and other
largely Muslim countries. In London, thousands demonstrated outside the
Israeli
embassy; thousands more protested in Paris and elsewhere across Europe.
In New
York, over 1,500 showed up in Times Square on a few hours notice on May
31,
while hundreds came out in cities from Chicago to San Francisco and Los
Angeles. The protests brought together Turks, Arabs, leftists, and many
Jewish
demonstrators (including in Israel) outraged over the massacre. The
Internationalist
Group joined the NYC protest with signs proclaiming, “Gaza Supply Ship
Massacre
= Bloody Israeli War Provocation,” “Israel Out of Gaza and the West
Bank –
Defend the Palestinian People!” and “Defend Gaza – Defeat Israeli-U.S.
War on
Palestinians!”

Imperialist
rulers felt obliged to issue mild criticisms of the Israeli
government’s brazen
actions. German chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “shocked” at the
deaths
and that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was “not helpful.” French president
Nicholas
Sarkozy criticized Israel’s “disproportionate” use of force. U.S.
president
Barack Obama’s reference to the deaths on the Gaza flotilla as “tragic”
set off
a torrent of vituperation from right-wingers and hard-line Zionists.
But
Washington mainly concentrated on making sure a United Nations Security
Council
resolution didn’t explicitly criticize Israel. The diplomatic
tut-tutting was
followed by a feigned dispute over who was to carry out an “impartial
investigation” of events, the U.N. or Israel! Aside from the absurdity
of the
Zionist mass murderers investigating themselves and the notion that the
imperialist powers that dominate the U.N. could possibly be
“impartial,” what’s
to investigate? Whether the Israelis shot before or after meeting
resistance is
irrelevant. Any and all efforts to repel the marauding Zionist killers
were utterly
justified. We salute the activists who heroically sought to defend the
ship and
its passengers against the Israeli terrorists.

The
Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call to break
the murderous Israeli blockade of Gaza! We warn against
illusions that
the imperialists will somehow come to the aid of the beleaguered
Palestinian
population. Particularly for the U.S., of which Israel has for decades
been a
“strategic ally,” but also for the other imperialist powers, the
Zionist state
serves the role of a gendarme to police a vital region against the
semi-colonial peoples of Asia and Africa (as well as a supplier of
paramilitary
mercenaries in Latin America). It is to the world working class that we
look to defend
Gaza and the Palestinian masses, both in the Occupied
Territories and
in Israel itself. In the face of this latest bloody crime we call on
the
workers movement to boycott cargo, ships and
planes to and from Israel while
fighting for Arab-Hebrew workers revolution in
Palestineand a socialist
federation of the Middle East.

For
International Workers Solidarity Action to Defend the Palestinians

IG at
May 31 protest in New York City's Times Square against
Israeli
massacre.(Internationalist
photo)

In
response to the December 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza, the IG and LFI
issued a
“call for action by the international working class in defense of Gaza
and the
Palestinian people, including efforts to break the siege.” We added:

“Impotent
consumer boycotts of Israeli goods or Israeli academics do not target
the
Zionist rulers or their imperialist backers, whereas a refusal by
transport
workers to unload Israeli ships or planes is the kind of class
action that could send a powerful message to the racist
rulers.”
–“Zionist Mass Murder: Break the Siege, Defend Gaza!” (31 December
2008),
reprinted in The Internationalist No.
28, March-April 2009

In fact, in February 2009 dock workers in
Durban,
South Africa carried out such an exemplary action, boycotting the
Israeli ship Johanna Russ. In response to the recent
Israeli massacre of the Gaza aid flotilla, the South African Transport
and
Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) instructed its members “not to allow any
Israeli
ship to dock or unload in any South African port.” This call was taken
up by a
dozen Palestinian labor organizations who called on dock workers unions
worldwide to block Israeli maritime trade, demanding an end to the
Israeli
blockade of Gaza.

At
the same time, the Swedish Port Workers Union issued a notice that it
would
blockade all Israeli ships and cargo to and from Israel for a period
now set
for the week of June 22-29. The Swedish dockers earlier played a
leading role
in boycotting cargo to and from apartheid South Africa and the Pinochet
dictatorship in Chile. On June 9, the Norwegian Transport Workers
Federation
went further and called for a two-week blockade of the country’s ports
to
Israeli ships and cargo beginning June 15. Similar actions are under
discussion
by dock workers federations and local unions elsewhere in Europe and
the U.S.,
posing the possibility of wider internationally linked workers boycott
action. In
line with this, on June 20 a picket of an Israeli Zim line ship has
been called
for the Port of Oakland, California.

Trotskyists
look to independent working-class action that has the power to combat
Israeli
crimes and point the way to bringing down the murderous Zionist regime
through
proletarian revolution. Reformist leftists, in contrast, almost
unanimously
call for action by the imperialist governments, as if they could
somehow become
potential allies of the oppressed Arab masses.

In
the United States, Socialist Action (S.A.) circulated a statement by
the United
Secretariat (USec), with which it is fraternally related and which
falsely
claims to be the continuity of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The June
1 USec
statement declares that “Everywhere where the solidarity movement is
not yet
strong enough to compel governments to break in practice with the
Israeli
state, people should take matters into their own hands with massive
boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.” The International Socialist
Organization (ISO), approvingly quotes an organizer of the Free Gaza
Movement
saying, “The U.S. government has to be put under pressure to act in a
responsible manner and stop the double standard it always applies to
Israel” (Socialist Worker, 1 June). The ISO also
pushes the boycott-divestment-sanctions campaign:

“The
BDS movement is a people's initiative, based upon both consumer and
worker-end
boycotts of Israeli goods and services, while asking people to deprive
Israel
of the immunity it has enjoyed while committing its crimes. It
consciously
models itself upon the same movement which helped defeat apartheid in
South
Africa.”

Protester in Barcelona calls to boycott
Israel, May 31.Josep Lago/AFP

The
movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel arose in
response
to a 2005 call by a number of Palestinian “civil society
organizations.”
Pressed to the wall by relentless Zionist repression, many in occupied
Palestine desperately call for any and all solidarity action. In the
imperialist countries, particularly on university campuses, campaigns
for “BDS”
have sometimes become a referendum on opposition to vs. support for
Zionist
Israel and its crimes.1 The boycott campaign in the West is
an
expression of
moral outrage, but at bottom it is aimed at enlisting imperialist
rulers. “BDS”
activists hope that the Gaza flotilla massacre could be the event, as
Ali
Abunimah wrote on the website Electronic
Intifada (4 June), “spurring governments to follow the lead of
their people
and take unprecedented action to check Israel's growing lawlessness.”
This
perspective is deeply disorienting, in several ways, to a real struggle
against
the oppression of the Palestinian people.

For one
thing, “BDS” implies that the
supposedly democratic imperialist countries
are less culpable than Zionist Israel. Yet the victims of U.S.
imperialism
number in the many millions (3-4 million dead in Korea, 2-3 million in
Indochina, close to 1 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and
counting), vastly
outnumbering the numbers slaughtered by the Israeli military and
paramilitary
settlers in Palestine. So why not refuse to buy any products made in
the United
States, refuse to hire American faculty, call for U.N. and European
Union
sanctions against the U.S., etc.? “BDS” also implies that a “mass
movement”
could pressure the imperialists into defending the Palestinian Arab
people.
This is an illusion, particularly in the case of the United States,
whose
alliance with Israel is strategic. Israel is a key element in Western
domination of the Middle East, including vital oil supplies and trade
routes,
which also benefit the European imperialists. No amount of popular
pressure
will change that.

If
Washington pushes that Tel Aviv to lighten up on the repression, it
will only
be a slight modification at most. The Palestinians will still be caught
in a
Zionist vise. Consumer boycotts notoriously have little effect – and
who
buys
Israeli matzo or chocolate anyway?
Moreover, anyone
who thinks the Pentagon will stop buying Israeli software for its
computers or
stop hiring Israeli mercenaries to train its paramilitary death squads
in Latin
America is dreaming. Getting a few pension funds and imperialist
corporations
not to invest in Israel won’t starve Israeli businesses of funds. But
even if
by some miracle they did, and Israel became an international pariah,
this won’t
stop the Zionist butchers. They are junior partners and allies of
imperialism,
but Israel’s capitalist rulers have their own reactionary interests and
agenda.
They are perfectly capable of turning on their patrons in Washington,
like when
Israeli jets and gunboats napalmed and torpedoed the U.S.S.
Liberty, evidently out of pique over U.S. neutrality in the 1967
war.

The
boycott, sanctions and divestment campaign also distorts what happened
in South
Africa. That effort was launched by the African National Congress,
which
calculated that pressure from U.S. and European imperialists would get
South
Africa’s racist rulers to make democratic reforms. It didn’t happen.
The apartheid
regime couldn’t be reformed, and it was not brought down by Americans
refusing
to buy krugerrands or Citibank not investing in South Africa. In fact,
as
Trotskyists warned at the time, to the extent that sanctions and
boycotts had
an effect, it was to increase the exploitation and weaken the South
African
black proletariat, particularly miners and metal workers, whose
militant
strikes were a key factor in ending apartheid. The other principal
factor was
that, as a result of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet
Union,
the South African Communist Party (which played a dominant role in the
ANC and
the black workers unions) was deemed less of a threat. So the Western
imperialists and South African capitalists decided to cut a deal with
Nelson
Mandela.

Moreover,
while the end of apartheid brought formal democratic gains (“one
person, one
vote”) and put in office a black majority government, the class
oppression of
black and colored working people in South Africa has not only not diminished, it has actually
increased the inequality and poverty. Who has benefited is a tiny layer
of
black professionals who climbed aboard the capitalist gravy train.
Should a
Palestinian pseudo-state come about as the result of imperialist
pressure, the
beneficiaries will not be the impoverished masses living in the giant
slum of
Gaza or in West Bank ghettos like Ramallah, but a gaggle of Palestinian
capitalists who will exploit Palestinian labor on behalf of Israeli
capital.
Palestinian refugees will still be unable to return to their homes and
lands
stolen by the Zionists in 1948 and since. And the corruption of
legendary
proportions that infused the Palestinian Authority under Yasir Arafat
and his
successor as P.A. president Mahmoud Abbas is only a foretaste.

Trotskyists
do not call for consumer boycotts, capitalist divestment and
imperialist
sanctions against Zionist Israel, nor did we against Pinochet’s
dictatorship in
Chile in the 1970s, apartheid South Africa in the ’80s or Haiti under
the
military junta in the ’90s, for the same reason we do not call today
for U.S.
aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti: imperialism is not a policy but a
system – it cannot
be pressured into aiding the oppressed, it must be overthrown. We
demand an end
to the Israeli blockade of Gaza and defend efforts to break it.
Likewise, we demand
an end to all U.S. aid to Israel,
some $7 million a day. We
demand that the Israeli army (and U.S. military advisers) get out of
the West Bank and
East Jerusalem, that the Zionist settlements be dispersed, that all
Palestinian
refugees have the right to return, that Palestinian prisoners be
released.
But the key to freeing Palestinians from a century of Western
imperialist and
Zionist domination is to mobilize the international working class
(including
Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking workers in Israel) which alone has
the
power to sweep away the Zionist rulers and their imperialist overlords.

■

1At
the
University of California-Berkeley this
past April there was a hotly contested vote by the student senate to
override
an executive veto of a student body resolution calling for divestment
of UC
funds from General Electric and United Technologies. Although a large
majority
of the student senate supported the resolution, both the right-wing
Zionist
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the liberal
Zionist J Street
lobby teamed up to defeat the measure by getting a few student senators
to
change their vote. In such a situation, particularly as the targets
were two
U.S. military contractors, it would have been correct to critically
support the
divestment motion.